The Personal And The Political Rle Social Theory

Are human misery, poverty and despair a result of personal inadequacy or social injustice? Therefore is the solution to these problems psychotherapy or political action? In one of the most important books on social work for a decade, Paul Halmos tries to resolve a dilemma which many social workers experience acutely – the conflict between a desire to help those in need and a fear that, by doing so, they merely support a political system which should, itself, be changed. Such a dilemma was highlighted during the sixties when 'casework' and personal counselling became discredited by the 'rediscovery' of widespread poverty and inequality in western society. To many the only solution seemed to be urgent and radical political action. For Professor Halmos the realities are more complex – an exclusive preoccupation with either personal or political solutions is unlikely to prove fruitful – what is needed is a dual sensitivity and balance. Yet for the author it is the political solution which carries within it the greater risk and he warns of the dangers inherent in the total politicization of social concerns. He argues that social action can become political action and ultimately political control.

This book explores and clarifies all the major issues and developments within ‘family theorising’. It covers the extraordinary growth and variety of approaches to the family over the last decade, the most significant being the impact of feminism and the professional and state intervention into the family through marital and family therapy. The author focuses on the growth of family counselling, giving a detailed analysis of the Home Office publication, Marriage Matters. He looks at the rapid growth of historical studies of the family, European theoretical developments, the work of the Rapoports, the role of systems theorising, and phenomenological and critical approaches to the family. He shows the relevance of family theorising for contemporary debates about the state of marriage and the family, and argues for the centrality of ‘family themes’ within wider sociological debates.

The studies which comprise this book are essentially organized around a critical encounter with European social theory in its 'classical period' – i.e. from the middle years of the nineteenth century until the First World War – and have the aim of working out some of the implications of that encounter for the position and prospects of the social sciences today. The issues involved relate to the following series of problems: method and epistemology; social development and transformation; the origins of 'sociology' in nineteenth-century social theory; and the status of social science as critique. In each of these areas, Giddens develops views that challenge existing orthodoxies, and connects these ideas to a reconstruction of social theory in the contemporary era.

This volume presents a series of illustrative and critical perspectives upon the developing study of men and masculinities and its importance for sociological theory. The contributions, by women and men from Britain and the United States, are organized around the unifying themes of Power and Domination; Sexuality; Identity and Perception. Feminism has raised profound questions for the social sciences, for sociological theory and for the study of men. The contributors to this volume discuss how such questions can be addressed. They demonstrate the range of theoretical traditions that can be brought to bear on the study of men, and underline the importance of understanding ‘masculinities’ in the plural. In a concluding section, three different views upon the controversy surrounding ‘Men’s Studies’ are presented.

This book examines the question of how our knowledge of social life affects, and ought to affect, our way of living it. In so doing, it critically discusses two epistemological models of social science – the positivist and the interpretive – from the viewpoint of the political theories which, it is argued, are implicit in these models; moreover, it proposes a third model – the critical – which is organised around an explicit account of the relation between social theory and practical life. The book has the special merit of being a good overview of the principal current ideas about the relation between social theory and political practice, as well as an attempt at providing a new and more satisfactory account of this relationship. To accomplish this task, it synthesises work from the analytic philosophy of social science with that of the neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt school.

Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia has been a profoundly provocative book. The debate about politics and social knowledge that was spawned by its original publication in 1929 attracted the most promising younger scholars, some of whom shaped the thought of several generations. The book became a focus for a debate on the methodological and epistemological problems confronting German social science. More than thirty major papers were published in response to Mannheim’s text. Writers such as Hannah Arendt, Ernst Robert Curtius, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Helmuth Plessner, Hans Speier and Paul Tillich were among the contributors. Their positions varied from seeing in the sociology of knowledge a sophisticated reformulation of the materialist conception of history to linking its popularity to a betrayal of Marxism. The English publication in 1936 defined formative issues for two generations of sociological self-reflection. Knowledge and Politics provides an introduction to the dispute and reproduces the leading contributions. It sheds new light on one of the greatest controversies that have marked German social science in the past hundred years.

The concepts of rationality that are used by social scientists in the formation of hypotheses, models and explanations are explored in this collection of original papers by a number of distinguished philosophers and social scientists. The aim of the book is to display the variety of the concepts used, to show the different roles they play in theories of very different kinds over a wide range of disciplines, including economics, sociology, psychology, political science and anthropology, and to assess the explanatory and predictive power that a theory can draw from such concepts.